The cognitive interview Flashcards
(10 cards)
what is the cognitive interview
The cognitive interview is a questioning technique designed to improve information that can an eye witness can retrieve about a crime.
What are the four parts to the cognitive interview
- Reinstate the context
- Report everything
- Reverse the order
- Change perspective
Importance of reinstate the context
- Based of Tulving Encoding specificity principle
- Cues available at recall need to be similar to the cues when the memory was encoded
- EWT may not be able to physically return to the scene of the crime but they can do so mentally
externally - thinking about the surrounding environment of the event ( the weather or what the room looked like)
internally - this involves thinking about how they were feeling a the time it focuses on their psychological state making use of all five scenes means there are a lot of cues that can trigger memories.
importance of report everything
ewts testimonies are said to report everything they can remember even the littliest details as they do not know whether those little details could have a significance or trigger the recall of more important memories.
Importance of reverse the order
The events of a crime should be recalled in a difference sequence in which they saw the crime take place
- recency effect - events that occured at the end are more likely to be remembered in greater detail than those at the middle or at the start
the negative effects of schemas :- Geilselman et al (1985) when events are recalled in forward order some people reconstruct what must have happened based on prior knowledge of similar crime scenerios
reversing the order of effects DSIRUPTS the effect of schemas and potentially leads to more accurate recall of events.
what is changing the perspective and its importance
- the eyewitness tries to recall the events from the perspective of others that were present during the crime.
This technique disrupts the effects of schemas and provides cues for the recall of other infortmation
What did Ronald Fisher do?
Ronald fisher developed the cognitive interview into the enhanced cognitive interview so ewt could further recall accurately
What does the enhance cognitive interview entail?
The interviewer building rapport with the interviewee
Fisher at al says that ‘ Victims are often asked to give detailed description of intimate, personal experiences to police officers who are complete strangers they suggest that victims must be psychologically comfortable with the interviewer as a person to go through the mental effort and emotional distress of describing crime related details.
police interviewers m must therefore invest time at the outset of the interview to develop meaningful, personal rapport with the witness
supporting evidence for the cognitive interview
Geisleman et al (1985)
- pps watched police training films of stimulated violent crimes
They were interviewed 48 hour later using either the standard or cognitive interview
Average number of correct items recalled in standard interview was 29.4 but in cognitive interview it was 41.2
Fisher et al (1989) - real life cases of robberies
experienced detectives were trained to use cognitive interview , 9 untrained detectives
Recordings of interviews so they could be later analyzed.
They found that the 7 detective group produced 63% information with 90% accuracy compared to the non trained cognitive interview detective conditon
these studies demonstrate how the cognitive interview can lead too better memory recall in ewt over the standard interview
limitations of cognitive interview
- time consuming (training police officers and building rapport )
time pressures and the limited resources of the police mean the cognitive interview is rarely used.
